At least the scene where titular polar bear Norm meets a man in a polar bear suit is interesting from a furry standpoint.

Perhaps more exciting than the trailer itself is the announcement of the release date, which sees the movie go up directly against The Nut Job 2; it seems release date power plays aren't just for superhero movies, anymore. It may be interesting to see if either movie "flinches" in this cinematic game of chicken.

Recently a new young-readers’ book series premiered, courtesy of Jennifer Lynn Alvarez.Starfire is the first book in her new series The Guardian Herd, featuring a society of talking pegasi. “Once every hundred years, a black foal is born, prophesied to either unite or destroy the five herds of flying horses that live in Anok—fated to become the most powerful pegasus in all of the land. Star is this black foal. Even though Star has malformed wings that make him unable to fly, the leaders of each herd will take no risks and want to execute Star before his first birthday. With the help of his friends, Star must escape the clutches of the powerful leaders, and his epic journey of self-discovery turns into a battle between good and evil that will keep readers eagerly turning the pages.” They’ll have more pages to turn this coming April when Stormbound (the second book in the series) hits the shelves. Check out the official page from Harper Collins Publishers to find out more.

Hillary Bradfield describes herself as an animator, comic creator, and storyboard artist. Most recently she’s spent her time working on Disney XD’s Randy Cunningham, 9th Grade Ninja. On her own though, she’s created a comic strip adventure called Hank the Horseover on her blogspot. Follow the adventures of a cranky equine as he’s dragged along on a wild adventure by a young lady — who happens to look a lot like Hillary draws herself. Some of her Hank comics have been collected on dead trees as well, and Volumes 1 & 2 are available on her blogspot also.

Watership Down tries to be as realistic as possible except for its intelligent, talking rabbits.

The Heavenly Horse is much more fantastically complex, with its structured organization of equine herds into formal officers, the concepts of the Army of One Hundred and Five (a representative of each of the domesticated breeds of horses) who live in the horsey heaven known as the Courts of the Outermost West and the equine equivalents of Satan: the Dark Horse, his lieutenant, the fanged horse Anor the Destroyer, and the Soul Taker, who tempts horses into betraying themselves.

The good folks behind My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic decided that what this show needs is season long story arcs. All the cool shows are doing it now. This DVD tries to collect the first real season long story arc, from season 4 of the show, and pretty much fails spectacularly to do that.

Technically, this story arc contains the two part opener for the fourth season, “Princess Twilight Sparkle” parts one and two, in which the ponies realize they need to be looking for six keys to unlock a magic box that a tree just grew. Wow, that sentence doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, but I swear, it’s what happened. Those two episodes are not featured here.

Finally, we have the season four finale, where the box is opened when Twilight Sparkle finally figures out how to get her key, amongst other things, and, I guess, “Castle-Mania” technically features Twilight trying and failing to research the box, so 10 out of 26 episodes. I don’t think we can call the other 16 episodes filler when they so outnumber the “arc” episodes, and they’re usually better anyway.

Andrew Dickman is a professional storyboard artist in the field of animation. He is also, in his copious spare time, the creator of the on-line anthropomorphic comic called Roomies. Actually, of late he hasn’t had much spare time while he’s working multiple animation jobs, so it’s been a while since Roomies has been updated. Which means now might be a good time to catch up with Andy, Swain, and Mary, the anthropomorphic college-age room-mates who inhabit this fair comic. Visit Andrew’s web page to find out what we mean. Andrew has said that he hopes to bring this comic back to life some day, so make sure to keep checking back!

Back from Comic Con! Give us just a few minutes to get feeling back in our feet, and we’ll get busy with our reports.

Whew! All right, here we go then… Terry Cronin is a writer, best known for his comic book series Students of the Unusual and his Skinvestigator series of detective novels. Recently, inspired by his wife Ava (who loves horses), Terry hooked up with the artists Savannah McKendree and Gary Scott Beatty to create Horse Power G, the story of a young lady named Gertrude (“G”) and her prize horse, Amber. Sounds simple enough, yes? Here’s the twist: Read the comic forwards from the front to the middle and it’s told from the humans’ point of view, but read from the back to the middle and it’s the same story from the animals’ point of view! It all meets up right in the center with a cliffhanger leading right to the next issue. Horse Power G is published in full color by 3 Boys Productions. Visit the official Facebook page to find out more.